Here are some snaps from this past month. I’ve been working hard with some business items for my photography. Change is coming. Stay tuned. I am so thankful for all the love and support all of you have given me over these years. It gives me strength to keep going further. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. -M






Alas, my fall sport shooting opportunities are winding down. All of the local teams are finishing up their seasons and I am bummed to see them go. Indoors that is. The northern California fall has been epic this year. Gorgeous colors and a steady 60 degrees. But the inevitable rains are on the way and with them activities and daily assignments will tend to be held indoors. Not necessarily my favorite place to be. Oh if only there was high school downhill skiing in Fairfield. Wishful thinking. Here is some of my recent outdoor fall sport pictures. Best, -M








I just got back from a weekend fishing the Klamath River with my buddy Ryan Peterson, travel specialist at The Fly Shop. It was just gorgeous this time of year. The fall colors were really popping. I recently purchased a new Profoto AcuteB 600R power pack and lamp head and decided to test them out this weekend. Oh the possibilities. I think I am just scratching the surface with these images of the fly line ripping off the water. I was really pleased with the results. The best part of the trip was that I finally landed my first (small) steelhead. A long time coming. It was great to be back out on a river.

On a side note, I wanted to thank all of you for your votes and support of my work. The book voting end yesterday on the 9th of November. I really appreciate all of the feedback and comments you all posted. Alas, after getting around 265 votes I don’t think I reached enough to make it into the final round of the book judging but I was able to reconnect with many of you and meet some new friends in the process. I look at it as a challenge to improve for the next time. Thanks again everyone. Tight lines, -M









Happy Halloween everybody! -M






After almost a year of working on this project, I am happy to announce the release of my first coffee table book “Shopping for Dynamite – A Brotherly Adventure to South America.” The book documents, through photographs and stories, the six month journey my brother and I made in 2008 backpacking throughout the whole of South America. Ever wonder why I named my new photography book “Shopping for Dynamite”? Below is a new commercial I made that gives the back story into how I came to name my book. When my brother Eric and I were in Potosi, Bolivia, we had heard that you could purchase dynamite. We had to check it out. This is what we found. Thanks to everyone who has voted for my book on Blurb.com. Hope you all get an opportunity to check it out. Anxious to hear what you all think and please…Spread the word and if you like it, buy a copy. Thanks. -M








I had an awesome October. Just came off an awe inspiring week in upstate New York when I attended the Eddie Adams Workshop Barnstorm XXII. I met a lot of amazing photographers and got a chance to show my work a lot of big wiggs in the journalism industry. I should have some photos up from last weekend soon. I love this time of year.





Here are a couple new shots from the past week. I have been pouring all of my energy into getting my portfolio ready for the Eddie Adams Workshop coming up next week. I can not wait. It promises to be pretty intense. More to come…

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

– John Peter Berger, an art critic, novelist, painter, and author.








Coming off my football portraits last week, I have been pushing onward with the start of fall sports. It is nice to be busy again here at the paper. I’m looking forward to what comes next. I found out that I have been featured on the blog of a new up and coming fly fishing magazine called The Flyfish Journal. You can find the link here. The magazine is set to be on news stands throughout the states at the end of September and I will have numerous fly fishing photographs from my travels in South America expedition featured in their inaugural issue. Feel free to let them know what you think of my work. Best, -M











Well after a long summer, football season has finally arrived. Things are starting to get busy around the paper with the dawn of the new school year. Prep sports are getting underway and my newspaper, like so many others, does an annual prep football preview section to ring in the new season. I was assigned to shoot portraits of the new guys filling in the empty positions on varsity. I have been shooting nothing but portraits all week. Actually a fun change of pace for me. The last two are from another story about die-hard pro football fans. Getting ready for some football. Go Bears!


I have always been a huge live music fan. As a high school student growing up in Chicago, there wasn’t a summer weekend when I wasn’t seeing a band in the city. Still to this day, I am consistantly watching my radar of when the next good band comes to town in anticipation of seeing them. So when our Daily Republic Tailwind editor Nick DeCicco approached me about trying to get press passes to this year’s Outside Lands Music Festival, I was all about it. Getting them wasn’t a guarantee, but it was worth a shot.

About two weeks before the show, we got the word that we had been approved and we started making our plans for the three day show. I have shot a couple big concerts before but nothing of this magnitude. So when I arrived after navigating the BART system, it took me a while to take it all in. The festival consisted of five music stages scattered throughout Golden Gate Park in downtown San Francisco. I wanted to show a variety of the acts that would be performing so Nick and I roughly planned out which acts we wanted to see and have me photograph. The festival organizers were very helpful towards the press, extending complementry food and beer but very firm in their rules when it came to shooting the musicians. Every band was accessible to shoot during their performance but the photographers would only have access to the front photo pit (infront of the audience front row seating) for the first three songs of a set. This was awesome and at the same time could be frustrating. Because of the very short amount of time, I had to join the scrum of photographers shooting frantically and try to get as many usable images as possible. Your constantly shooting, moving around, dodging other shooters and fighting for a good shooting angle. It was chaos but a hell of a lot of fun to be apart of. There is something to be said of experiencing a concert inches from the band members performing on stage. The festival was a gathering for celebration and it provided an endless supply of enthusiastic people and good photo opportunities. It was an experience I won’t soon forget. -Mike

Check out more photos at our new media gallery at http://www.photo.dailyrepublic.net/?p=386







I was on my way out the door from an assignment today and I came across this scene. Geese crossing the road. Nothing special. But the light was really nice and one falling behind gave a little hop to get to the other end. I kinda like this shot and I wanted to share it. -M







I recently did a story on my roommate Anna who is doing a study for her University of California Davis ecology grad program on large mouth bass in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It is a pretty cool study aimed at determining what effects the non-native bass are having on the native fish like the endangered delta smelt. This is just a small piece of the puzzle regarding water usage throughout the state. Anna had the fun part. With the help of her assistants, she has been catching these bass, worm and pole style and then performing surgery on them to implant tracking devices. It was a pretty crazy process to watch. It will be interesting to see what happens next when the data will start pouring in.











Another collection of photographs from a very overdue post. August like July was an incredibly slow month for us here at the paper. I have been taking the opportunity to put together a newer version of my Shopping for Dynamite book about the six month journey through South America with my brother Eric. The book is in it’s final stages after countless edits and re designs. I will make an official post when it is completed. So for now here are some images that I have made lately. -M









Ever since landing my job in Fairfield, California I have been hard pressed to get the time to go fly fishing. Regardless of the direction I could head, it would be a solid 2-3 hour drive to get to some decent trout streams. And with that knowledge, there always seemed to be something else occupying my attention. It was maddening. So when a scheduling change up at work allowed me a four day weekend, there was only one thing on my mind. I needed to get my line wet. My brother Eric is a pilot up in Alaska and after one of our weekly phone conversations, the idea of a road trip came up. One of the perks of his job is his ability to fly for free on Alaskan Airlines. I proposed a weekend fishing mission to the greater Yosemite National Park/Eastern Sierra mountains and he jumped at the idea. Weeks went by and all the necessary preparations were made. I picked Eric up at the San Francisco Airport around 11 p.m. and we decided to push on (4 hours) through the night driving all the way to Mammoth Lakes. Having never fished the area before, stopped at one of the local fly shops in the area called The Trout Fly and ended up getting the scoop from Granite, one of the knowledgeable guides in the shop. For the next three days we fished the Upper Owens River, Hot Creek and the Tuolumne River within Yosemite National Park landing countless 10-12 inch rainbows and brookies. Nothing to do cartwheels over, but it was a great opportunity to scratch the fly fishing itch, make some cool night photographs, explore the pretty scenery and catch up on each others lives while sharing a bourbon bottle between us.





A couple weeks ago, my morena Clara and I along with my two roommates Zach and Anna made a trek to Lake Tahoe to hike up Mt. Tallac. There was a great view from the top.




Harvest is in full swing here in California. Everywhere you can see the explosion of fruit stands along the roads and the numerous farmers markets in the small towns. Having started my own vegetable garden I now know the rewards of patience for letting your crop come into its maturity. What most people don’t realize is that behind the scenes of the California law enforcement, another type of harvest is being conducted. The cultivating of marijuana. Eradication is a better word for it. Last week I was able to tag along with the Solano County Sheriff Department for a drug bust on a couple illegal pot gardens in the nearby hills of Pleasant Valley. This is nothing new for them. Every year law enforcement officials bust thousands of these gardens throughout the state. This time would be no different. The same protocol was applied. Find and identify the plants from helicopters in the air, organized your crew of undercover policemen and drug task force officers, and then send in the troops to disperse/arrest the growers on sight while eradicating the crops.

I was on hand to document the eradication of the plants. The law officials had identified about 6000 plant garden and by the time I had arrived, they had sent in their armed police officers to cut down and and haul out the goods. Unfortunately the press wasn’t invited to this part of the event. We would have to wait at the drop point. The wait wasn’t that long. Maybe twenty minutes. Then I looked up hearing the buzz of the on coming helicopter bringing in the drugs. It isn’t everyday you have the county police placing thousands of marijuana plants at your feet. The familiar smell from college was engulfed all around us. As I stood on top of the awaiting dump truck I shot pictures as officers worked to free the plants from their transport nets. It was a surreal feeling to be crawling over literally hundreds of thousands dollars worth of drugs. I kept thinking it was so much fuss over such a simple plant. As I watched the officers pour diesel fuel over the massive pile of marijuana, I grabbed a six foot plant and had Vacaville Reporter photographer Rick Roach take a portrait of me. You never know when another opportunity like this would come again. Something tells me that living here in California, I won’t have to wait to long. -M










It was pretty incredible. June seemed like such a busy month for assignments and then July came around and instantly there was almost nothing. It has been a blessing and a curse. Good because I have been avoiding going out into the 100 degree heat of Fairfield and have instead been devoting my time to revamping my Shopping for Dynamite book. It has been bad because I haven’t been shooting much photos. Hence the lack of July posts. I figured I would post some of my favorites of the month here.

I wanted to talk a little bit about a photo illustration that ran on the front this past week’s Sunday Sports section of the Daily Republic. I was assigned early last week to photograph our sports department’s picks for the Track Athletes of the Year, Daje Pugh and Dante Thomas of Fairfield High School. I love getting these type of portrait assignments. There are no rules for them and they allow me full control of the final outcome. They allow me to really think of creative ways to show individuals in a different way. Such was the case for photographing Daje and Dante. Both of these athletes had stellar track & field seasons this year. The story was focusing on their success in their hurdling events. I wanted to show them hurdling. Going to the track was too obvious of a place to photograph them. I wanted to put them in a not so common place. I find that coming up with the concept of a portrait photograph is usually half the battle. I found my idea for this image while driving past the water fountain in downtown Fairfield and seeing the kids playing in it. My thought process was that I wanted to show big kid athletes playing but at the same time look tough. I wanted to show them exploding through the water like they did to their opponents this past season. I felt the fountain would be the perfect canvas.

I called up each of them and told them my idea for the shoot. Both were up for it and we settled on a time to meet. I chose a time in the late afternoon when I knew that the light would be the best. Their were numerous things for this shoot that would be out of my control. Weather and the fountain. I arrived an hour earlier with fellow photographer Chris Jordan to test the light and to figure out how I was going to shoot Daje and Dante. Chris and I did some test shots with my portable light set up and determined which fountain jets I would have them jump through.

Once I had my exposure and lights dialed in, it was time to have Daje and Dante step in. We were at the mercy of the fountain. Each time the fountain shot off, I have Daje and Dante sprint and jump through a pre determined jet of water. This was the tricky part. It is very difficult to get both your subjects looking stellar in the same shot. As a photographer there is little I could do to help remedy this besides encouraging them to keep their eyes open or to direct how and when they should jump. My lighting consisted of two Nikon Speedlight strobes on stands: one at far camera left to counter the evening sunlight and one just to my right to add a little pop to their faces. These were triggered remotely by my pocket wizards. I would only get one flash burst per jump to light up my subjects. Therefore, I had to wait to squeeze the camera shutter at just the right moment. This process took many attempts to do. Despite the cool breeze and the oncoming sunset, Daje and Dante were good sports about their numerous runs through the fountain.


After the shoot, I returned to the Daily Republic Photo Department and began the final series of steps to make this photo illustration come together. I choose the best two images (see above) and spent a whole day working in Photoshop to carefully blend together these to images. Once my two subjects were together on the same canvas, I added extra jets of water to the background to enhance the overall impact of the image. The spray of the water made it really difficult to blend together. It was tedious work but in the end I was quite pleased with the results. -Mike Greener

This is a multimedia story I just completed for my newspaper about an unique, youth out reach program that the Fairfield, California Police Department is implementing into combating local street racing. It had been awhile since I last brought our HD video camera out to an assignment. Top the Cops drag racing event at Infineon Raceway. I thought it turned out pretty good. -M